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It's an Addiction, Not a Deliberately Chosen Moral Failing. [1]

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Date: 2025-02-20

I am in remission, still, from childhood onset rheumatoid arthritis.

I have known several people who have the same condition, who, unluckily, have not gone into remission.

I credit the new drug [then] ibuprofen with my remission. I had a doc who trusted me and gave me a generous prescription, with refills. It’s not a scheduled drug, never was. I took it, carefully, as often as I needed it. Checked in with the doc every month. And in about a year, give or take, I realized one day that I didn’t need it anymore.

When I met, and when I meet, people who suffer from this form of arthritis:

I don’t gloat about the fact that I had it too but MINE is GONE

I may or may not share that I’m in remission, depending on their apparent emotional state; if I do share this I tell them how it happened, and that I know everyone reacts differently to their medications

I listen to them and empathize with their pain, which is not difficult because I know that pain intimately

If they’re science-y brainstorming types I might chat with them about things in the medical literature that have apparently worked for others. But only if they’re interested. If they’re a “my Doctor says” type, I don’t push them. They know, if I’ve told them, that I once had it too.

I don’t go away afterwards feeling all superior because I’m in remission and they are not. I usually go away feeling a bit of survivors’ guilt, and wishing there was something, anything, that I could have done for them that would help.

Arthritis isn’t a lifestyle choice. It isn’t a moral choice. I didn’t wake up one day at age nine, notice that my knees hurt like hell, and think “oh cool! I like this! I want more of it!” I went out to the kitchen for breakfast and told my parents, and they said it might be “growing pains” and gave me an aspirin.

When it became obvious that something was wrong, they took me to the doctor. I had a long love affair with sodium salicylate and Ben-Gay… until tall, dark, handsome ibuprofen swept me away forever. But I was never a virtuoso, on violin or guitar, because arthritis changed the joints in my hands, subtly but forever, and the speed a virtuoso needs was simply impossible for me.

I have come to believe that MAGA is a disease. That Nazism is a disease. A disease that, like arthritis, changes and eventually deforms the sufferer.

Like addiction, in fact. I have come to believe that MAGA, that any form of authoritarianism, is a form of addiction.

Now, before people take issue with my analogy, I’m going to suggest that you look up Dakota Adams, his mother Tasha, and his siblings, and read up on what their lives were like. Tasha Adams married Elmer “Stuart” Rhodes, the man who founded The Oath Keepers. Read about what her marriage was like, what their kids’ childhoods were like. Read what it took for them to realize, one after another, that something was wrong, and how serious it was, and that they had to escape.

Growing up in a right wing household is incredibly dysfunctional, and your parents don’t have to be paramilitary fanatics for that to be true. So a crippling disease analogy isn’t as farfetched as you might think.

Maybe, when we are thinking about MAGA, and especially about escaped MAGA, we should try to think more along public health lines — that this is an epidemic, but it deforms people’s thinking /reasoning skills rather than warping their joints. And that people CAN go into remission. That they CAN be cured.

[And yes, like addicts, they can also relapse. Because it’s an addiction. And they may relapse even with serious support. But aren’t they far more likely to relapse if they receive no support at all?]

I would never have asked any of my arthritic acquaintances why they refused to water ski. Arthritis wasn’t a choice for them. They weren’t doing it AT anyone.

We need to stop looking at the MAGA phenomenon as a total, free willed choice, which it manifestly IS NOT; and start looking at it as a disease state. Drug addiction treatment became much more successful — to the extent that it is, I know, I know — when the righteously indignant stopped treating addiction as a moral failing. All of a sudden we started learning all kinds of pertinent things about brain chemistry…

I strongly recommend getting over the “moral failing” model here as well. Authoritarianism IS A MIND DISEASE. IF we learn to treat it that way, we may be able to make some progress overcoming it.

PS to those who will object that addictions aren’t deliberately encouraged, I say oh the hell they’re not, how do you think pushers create their market? Go read about how cigarettes were marketed to adults as sexy and cool, how they were marketed to adolescents, to Black communities. You bet your tailfeathers addictions are encouraged. Go look at FOX as if it were a hate pusher, and see how it looks to you from that perspective. If you need to find human evil in this, THAT is the place to look. You will find it there.

PSS. I’m still in remission. And I’m 70, and I dance. No, this isn’t me. Except in spirit.

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